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Cass told me to use them in my own front yard seven days ago. Use us. It took me two more days and nine of them standing on my grass before I could type four words into a phone, and I felt sick doing it, and she answered in under a minute and never once made me say it twice.

She's forty feet away on that stair right now with a hole under her ribs she got standing behind me.

Maren's watching my face do all of that.

"There it is," she says softly. "That's the thing you're scared of."

"Yes."

The honesty costs me less than I expect. That's new too.

"Okay." She holds out her hand, palm up, and her fingers are steady. "Then let me."

I've heard days of arguments and coven lore and my own father's voice, and it turns out the thing that breaks me is a woman standing in the middle of a hole she's about to close, asking permission.

I put my hand in hers.

"Take it," I say. "Whatever's in me. Take it."

Something goes through her face that I'll be thinking about when I'm old.

"How does it work?"

"You reach." My throat isn't right. "It's been sitting there since April waiting for someone to."

She closes her eyes.

I feel her come in, and it's nothing like what I've spent years dreading. There's no taking in it at all. It's a hand going into a dark drawer, careful, feeling for the shape of what's there before it picks anything up.

She finds the place.

And I open my chest to my wolf that has already chosen and has begged me for her every night since. I ask him, out loud, for the only thing he has ever wanted.

"Now," I say. "You win. Go on."

He comes up.

Twenty-nine years he's lived under my ribs like a second heartbeat, and he comes up the only road there's ever been, through my hands and my teeth and my spine, and for about half a second I'm braced for the thing I've refused since April.

He doesn't go for her.

He gets to the end of me, where she's tied herself off, and he stops there like a horse stopping at a gate. Then he puts his weight on it.

That's all. He takes hold of her end from my side, and he holds.

Two of us are on this rope now, and neither one of us is pulling.

Maren's breath goes out of her.

Her chin comes up and her eyes come open, and they aren't hazel anymore. Gold, both of them, edge to edge, lit from somewhere behind. Gold comes up under the skin of her wrist where my hand is closed around it, a thin band burning through from the inside like wire heating in the dark.

The light coming off between us stops being white. It goes up the walls and across the ceiling and along the gallery rail and out through the open front doors into the street, and every unbroken pane of glass in the Hollis mansion rings at once, like someone drew a bow across all of it.

Then he speaks, and I feel her hear him.

Ours.

Maren's whole face changes.